Role of Nanotechnology in Coronavirus Detection

Document Type

Article

Department

Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Abstract

To forestall the continuous spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus, various guidelines were rolled out by the World Health Organization and various governments of different countries that were most affected. This was done in addition to early detection challenges and limited tests that may endanger the populace during the ongoing widespread coronavirus. Having understood the dynamism in terms of viral replications and development of the COVID-19 to an appreciable extent, 47 different testing procedures, including nucleic acid and protein-based tests, are available and currently being utilized despite the challenges of optimization and viral load change. Therefore, there is a need for point-of-care devices for self-diagnosis, which will be fast, accurate, and cheap. Nanotechnology had gained lots of prominence in bioengineering, biomedical, and medicine aspects of drug development, delivery, and biosensor development. Nano-based biosensors can be deployed to detect diseases at the early stages of infection because of their reliability, sensitivity, and reduction in the use of chemical reagents for analysis. However, few studies have been conducted on the extent of adverse use of the nanoparticles in healthcare applications – which are scalability, inhalation, and the nanotoxicity that have to do with hepatotoxicity, cardiotoxicity, immunotoxicity, nephrotoxicity, and genotoxicity. These side effects of the nanoparticles may occur in organs such as the liver, spleen, lungs, kidney, and heart when they absorb materials that are injected into the body system, thereby generating toxic products. Nevertheless, methods of determining the toxicity of NPs have been developed, and the usage was found effective for silica-based NP on kidney cells, while further investigations are required to broaden the scope by exploring other nanoparticles. Because nanotechnology has the proven potentials in combating SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses in aspects of detections, vaccine development, and delivery, this technology and also the emerging ones do have hidden risks; therefore, the risk assessment in its utilization (in vivo and in vitro) has to be carried out to reduce the hazards to an allowable limit.

Comments

This work was published before the author joined Aga Khan University.

Publication (Name of Journal)

Wiley

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1002/9783527832521.ch6

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